Hilary Kornblith Quotes

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• When I think about discussions at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a group which includes not only philosophers and psychologists, but also computer scientists and linguists, it is noteworthy that one can't always tell just from the content of particular contributions from the audience, whether a given questioner is a philosopher or an empirical scientist.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Thinking, Psychology

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• 17th century philosophers were not in a position to understand the mind as well as we can today, since the advent of experimental methods in psychology. It shows no disrespect for the brilliance of Descartes or Kant to acknowledge that the psychology which they worked with was primitive by comparison with what is available today in the cognitive sciences, any more than it shows disrespect for the brilliance of Aristotle to acknowledge that the physics he worked with does not compare with that of Newton or Einstein.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Psychology, Disrespect, Mind

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• But there is no doubt that my own views on this are, in quite a number of ways, very different from those of Quine.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Views, Numbers, Doubt

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• For one thing, I think that there are questions which philosophers raise which, although science bears on them, are not typically the central focus of those who work in the sciences. At the same time, I don't have a view of philosophy which marks it out as different in kind from scientific work

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Thinking, Views

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The idea that we should check on our unreflective belief acquisition sounds great, but we need to know whether the processes of reflection which we put to work serves to improve our reliability or not.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Reflection, Ideas, Sound

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• When I got to college, I planned to be a math major, and, in addition to signing up for some math courses, I decided to take some philosophy. Quite by chance, I took a philosophy of science course in which the entire semester was devoted to reading Locke's Essay. I was hooked. For the next few semesters, I took nothing but philosophy and math courses, and it wasn't long before I realised that it was the philosophy that really moved me.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Reading, Math

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• What we need to do, however, is figure out what our best available theories of the mind suggest about epistemological issues, while we recognise that we may need to change our views on these questions as new evidence comes in.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Views, Issues, Mind

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Externalists reject any such view. I think that the idea that we can tell, simply by way of reflection, whether our beliefs are justified, is deeply commonsensical. More than that, the idea that responsible epistemic agents ought to reflect on their beliefs, and hold them only if they somehow pass muster, is utterly natural.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Reflection, Thinking, Views

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Here, as in so many other cases, however, it turns out that a very commonsensical idea looks far less attractive when one examines some of the experimental work which is not available to us from the armchair.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Ideas, Looks, Attractive

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Chemists in earlier centuries were quite interested in the nature of acids. They had no interest in analysing their concept of acid. After all, they knew that their understanding of acids was at a fairly primitive level, and what they wanted to do was understand something about the world better - the nature of acidity - not something about their own concepts.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Understanding, World, Levels

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The worry that unreflective belief acquisition may be unreliable, after all, applies equally to reflective belief acquisition: it too may be unreliable. To my mind, the plausibility of internalist views about justification is dramatically decreased when one becomes vividly aware of what introspection and reflection actually achieve.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Reflection, Views, Worry

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I do think that an understanding of contemporary work in the cognitive sciences has a profound effect on how one views the workings of the mind. It doesn't work the way we pretheoretically think it does. Such an understanding, of course, should have a large effect on one's views in philosophy of mind, but also in epistemology.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Thinking, Views

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The great philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries did not think that epistemological questions floated free of questions about how the mind works. Those philosophers took a stand on all sorts of questions which nowadays we would classify as questions of psychology, and their views about psychological questions shaped their views about epistemology, as well they should have.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Thinking, Views, Should Have

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I am quite wedded to the view that epistemologists should concern themselves with knowledge rather than our concept of knowledge. The analogy I like to draw here is with our understanding of (other) natural kinds.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Views, Understanding, Analogies

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• So I do, of course, reject much that is central not only to the psychology of Descartes and Kant, but to their epistemology as well. No doubt, the best available theories of today will look primitive in comparison with what we are in a position to understand hundreds of years from now.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Years, Psychology, Doubt

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Internalist approaches to epistemology, I believe, have a great deal of intuitive appeal. Internalists believe that the features in virtue of which a belief is justified must somehow be internal to the agent. On some views, this amounts to the claim that these features must be accessible to introspection and armchair reflection. On others, it amounts only to the claim that they must be mental features.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Believe, Reflection, Views

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I believe, that empirically informed approaches to the question have issued in more illuminating answers than the old armchair approaches. But I think that it would be a terrible mistake to give up on addressing normative questions in epistemology.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Giving Up, Mistake, Believe

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• When I first began studying philosophy, a good deal of what went on in analytic epistemology was focused on addressing the Gettier problem. At first, I became quite caught up in it, and the kind of analytical ingenuity required for the work appealed to me. After a while, however, I started to lose interest.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Firsts, Study

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• What I hankered for was an account of knowledge which would do far more than get our intuitions about cases right; I wanted a kind of account which would somehow be explanatory.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Intuition, Kind, Cases

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Work on causal theories of knowledge - early work by Armstrong, and Dretske, and Goldman - seemed far more satisfying. As I started to see the ways in which work in the cognitive sciences could inform our understanding of central epistemological issues, my whole idea of what the philosophical enterprise is all about began to change. Quine certainly played a role here, as did Putnam's (pre-1975) work in philosophy of science, and the exciting developments that went on in that time in philosophy of mind.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Ideas

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• It started becoming clear to me how one might have views about the nature of mind and of knowledge which are empirically informed. This way of thinking about philosophical theorizing makes sense of how philosophy might be a legitimate intellectual activity, in a way that a good deal of the armchair philosophy, I believe, cannot.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Believe, Philosophical

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The kind of approach I take is different from much of experimental philosophy. Although the experimental philosophers and I are certainly in agreement about the relevance of empirical work to philosophy, a good deal of their work is devoted to understanding features of our folk concepts, and in this respect, at least, I see them as making the same mistake as those armchair philosophers who are interested in conceptual analysis.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Mistake, Agreement

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The experimentalists think that we can only get at our concepts by way of empirical investigation, while the armchair philosophers think that we can skip the experiments and figure things out from our armchairs. What they have in common, however, is regarding our concepts as the targets of philosophical theorising, and I just don't think that, in the vast majority of cases, the subject matter of philosophy has our concepts as its target.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Epistemologists should be concerned with knowledge and justification and so on, not our concepts of them; philosophers of mind should be concerned with various features of our mental life and the large-scale structure of the mind, not our concepts of mind, or consciousness, or anything else

  Hilary Kornblith

  Mind, Philosopher, Consciousness

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The role of empirical work in informing our philosophical theories, as I see it, is not that it gives us a better view of our folk concepts, but that it gives us a better view of knowledge, and the mind, and so on.

  Hilary Kornblith

  Philosophical, Views, Giving

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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